How did they know at any given point that it was still there? Wouldn’t they have to interact with it to be sure, causing an explosion and annihilating it? The explosion would be incredibly small with just one particle. Is the lack of explosion their only evidence that they had contained it? I’m stumped as to what it actually means to have one particle like this. How can you even know what temperature it is without interacting with it? And how do you interact with it without destroying it?
The particle does not have to interact directly with matter to be observable.
Apparently they built what they called a “one-positron quantum cyclotron”, meaning they made their single positron “fly in a circle” with magnetic fields to trap it.
That way you have a moving charge, which you can manipulate with electromagnetic radiation, microwaves in this case, the same way as you could with normal matter. That also means you can make your particle emit electromegnetic radiation that will tell you it is still there without touching anything.
Still kind of mindblowing, that they can reliably detect anything coming from a single positron though.
Poor particle did nothing bad
No Bad Particles: Physics the Woodhouse Way.
This is anti-electron astroturfing right here, verging on hate speech.
Everyone calm down. There’s enough love in the world for all the different types of particles.
Oh, and I suppose you want the electrons and positrons to just hug it out?!
This is actually really exciting! I fucking love anti-matter, always been fascinated by it.
If anti-matter can exist, why is our universe made of matter? This is the Baryon Asymmetry question that this research seeks to answer. The team has proven they can isolate a single positron. The next step is to measure it to as much accuracy as they have with the electron. Perhaps they will find differences!
Summer '25 CERN showed that anti-matter baryons (protons, neutrons, etc) decay differently - link. So there’s a good chance they might find something!
Would love to actually see anti-matter but that’s a long way off. Really hope anti-matter likes to stick together and we could actually build atoms out of it. Would be crazy to study the properties of anti-water! Maybe that’s just science fiction. In any case, very excited for the coming research!
If you love antimatter. eat banana. It contains traces of antimatter.
The problem is it also contains a non-insignificant quantity of banana.
“Would love to actually see anti-matter” - are you being literal here? because that would require a vacuum between your eyes and antimatter that emits at a visible frequency. Not entirely impossible, but detection and recording of an anti-hydrogen transition wavelength is more easily achievable. This might be no more than an LCD display indicating a non-zero number though. Exciting for sure, but not necessarily a visual spectacle.
Yeah very literal. Would need millions of atoms of the stuff. Actually maybe that’s too dangerous lol
We have managed to see a single strontium atom - link. Maybe that’s attainable with anti-matter.
But yeah you’re right, capturing an anti-hyrdogen emission would be an huge achievement itself!
Make the glass of anti water on the moon just in case heh.
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Shit. See, I already blew the moon up.
I always assume it’s the same reason why are have mostly right handed people. It’s just that the scales tipped at some point and it had to go down one way from that point.
I think the universe actually is perfectly balanced between antimatter and matter, but variation across space emerged as space expanded and our entire observable universe happens to be in a pocket where there was more matter than antimatter.
